One of conventional connector housings for an optical fiber cable has been described in the U.S. Pat. No. 4,422,716 which was issued on Dec. 27, 1983. The connector housing for an optical fiber cable comprises an outer and inner housing members which are coaxialy positioned, and a snap ring to be inserted between grooves which are formed on the corresponding inner and outer surfaces of the outer and inner housing members. The outer housing member is provided at one end on the inner surface with a screw thread into which there is inserted an adapter to support a ferrule for accomodating the terminating portion of an optical fiber therein, and the inner housing member is provided at one end on the inner surface opposite to the end of the outer housing member with a screw thread into which there is inserted a housing sleeve placed through a rubber sleeve over an optical fiber cable which is connected with the other optical fiber cable, while the snap ring is made of a resilient metal strip which is circular to have a gap between both ends.
In operation of connecting a pair of optical fiber cables by use of a connector housing mentioned above, a pair of the connector housings and an adapter are prepared. In one of the connector housing, the housing sleeve for the optical fiber cable is fixed to the inner housing member in accordance with the coupling of the screw thread thereof. Next, the ferrule of the optical fiber cable is inserted at the tip portion thereof into the adapter, while the outer housing member is rotated to be coupled with the adapter in accordance with the coupling of the screw thread thereof. Under the situation where the outer housing member is being coupled with the adapter, the inner housing member is pushed axially by the adpter so that the snap ring is also pushed from one side on which the adapter is positioned to the direction in which the optical fiber cable is positioned by the side wall of the groove of the inner housing member and is stopped on the other side by colliding with the side wall of the groove of the outer housing member. As a result, a resilient repulsion force is produced in the snap ring thereby to be applied to the coupling portion of the screw threads between the outer housing member and adapter so that the screw fixing force is increased therein. In the same manner as described above, the remaining connector housing is coupled on the other side of the adapter therewith and to a housing sleeve for the remaining optical fiber cable so that the pair of the optical fiber cables are interconnected.
In the conventional connector housing, however, a screw fixing force as expected is not obtained between the adapter and outer housing member for the reason why the resilient repulsion force of the snap ring is limited in its level because the resilient deformation is small due to the configuration thereof. As a result, there is resulted in less reliability in the connection of optical fiber cables.
On the other hand, if there is adopted a spring member which produces much larger resilient force, operation of connecting optical fiber cables becomes difficult to be performed and a connector housing becomes larger in its size.